(upbeat Latin music) - Good evening and welcome to "Horizonte," a show that takes a look at current issues through a Hispanic lens.

I'm your host, Catherine Anaya.

Tonight we discuss the lack of Hispanic engineering students.

2020 stats from the American Society for Engineering Education reveal that only 9% of master degrees and 7% of doctoral degrees in engineering go to Hispanics.

That dearth of Hispanic engineering students became very apparent to Arizona State University doctoral engineering student David Flores Prieto, who studied in Mexico and in England.

He's now working to get more Hispanics into engineering.

We'll talk to David about his efforts.

But first here is Alondra Davila, one of the students participating in David's lab.

She attended Coronado High School in Scottsdale and is now a junior at ASU working on a degree in biomedical engineering.

- Growing up, I always adored my science and math classes.

I always thought there a lot of fun, and when I was in high school, I had the opportunity of joining my robotics team, and I was involved with that for throughout high school.

And that's what really gave me my first experience with engineering and I loved it since then.

I'm hoping to go into research and development someday in the future.

I'm currently involved in a research lab at ASU, and that would be my dream.

I decided to go to ASU just because it had a very strong engineering program, and I still wanted to live at home with my family due to financial reasons.

I don't feel like I had a lot of guidance or just somebody pushing me towards engineering.

I think that would've been a lot, that would've been really great to have in high school.

And my first two years of college, I haven't been able to get that sort of mentorship, but recently I have been able to find mentors.

I work in a research lab with him, and I help him out with a lot of experiments, and he teaches me many lab protocols, and how to do different experiments.

And it's been really rewarding, 'cause I get to have firsthand experience of what it's like to be in a research lab.

And he's always been incredibly, incredibly supportive.

As a first generation college student, I didn't know what resources were available to me, so being able to find extra sources of support was really important and helped me navigate through these difficulties and succeed.

Through his program, he's been offering me scholarship opportunities, internship opportunities, hands-on experience in a lab, which will greatly benefit me whenever I plan to apply for professional jobs or graduate programs.

And he's offered me a lot of resume review, and cover letter review, and just in general, helping me navigate post-secondary education.

College can be isolating in general, especially more isolating when you don't have people you can connect with.

So being able to connect with somebody on cultural heritage is really, really nice.

I'm incredibly, incredibly thankful to be a part of this program.

It's definitely helped me.

I have a higher sense of security and confidence in myself that I can succeed.

- We now welcome ASU doctoral engineering student, David Flores Prieto.

That's gotta make you feel good, hearing students talk about you like that.

- Yeah, it's the first time I hear it in person.

Sometimes when students graduate, they leave you little letters thanking you for the work you've done with them.

But seeing it like this, it's really rewarding.

- Well that's wonderful.

Let's talk about how it all began.

First of all, you were an undergraduate student in Mexico and then a graduate student in London before coming to ASU.

How did the Hispanic and Latino representation that you experienced there differ from what you found here at ASU?

- Yeah, so in Mexico, obviously, there's a lot of Hispanics there.

And actually a lot of the efforts are to bring international professors to the universities there.

So I had this one professor from the Republic of South Korea.

He was really good, but at the end of the day, my main work was under Dr. Sergio Camacho-Leon, who is my first mentor ever.

He gets the award for that, the props.

So in that regard, there was not a lot of issues with representation.

But once I start my master's studies in London, it's a huge university, but half of the population are international students.

And there was actually a small society that was just the Mexican student society.

And they hosted all kinds of events.

And especially opportunities for the students to present their research so they could flush their nerves out before big presentations.

And all across the universities in England, actually, each of them have their own Mexican student society and then every year they make a huge conference, all of them together, and they take turns hosting them.

- So when you came to ASU, at what point in your journey did you decide that, I need to become an advocate for Hispanic and Latino students who want to go into STEM or maybe don't have the mentorship surrounding them when they're already in the STEM programs?

- Yes, so I would say it was very early on.

So I started my PhD on January 2020.

And then in March of that same year, COVID hit, right?

So the work we do has to be in person because of the nature of the work we do.

So the lab closed for around six to seven months.

So I essentially lost all of my first year of in-person training.

But also I wasn't able to connect with people.

I wasn't able to build those connections, meet other other international students.

And me, along with some other few Mexican students I knew from different programs, we decided to launch a student organization.

And Dr. Enrique Vivoni, which at the point was the president of the graduate college, he gave us first of all, the verbal encouragement to do so, but also the funds to start putting out small events.

I was on the board of that organization for three years doing a lot of mainly social events.

But we also took charge to make a guide for international students in English and Spanish.

Writing small tips for ease their acculturation in the United States.

And up until this day, we still keep getting messages on our social media about how great the guide is and how it helps people decide if they wanna come or not to ASU.

- So it makes a very big difference in their experience especially going through the process, like you said, which can be very daunting.

So when you look at the number of Latino and Hispanic students that are in STEM, what do you think it's going to take to get those numbers up?

Do we need to start reaching students at a younger and younger age?

- Yes, I think there's two things.

First of all, of course mentorship, which is a lot of what I do, but I also believe there's a lot of grassroots efforts that need to be done.

I feel sometimes programs focus on students that are too far down the path of what they want to do in their lives.

So the younger you can reach them and inspire them to follow STEM professions, I think the easier it is to get them there.

For instance, when I came to ASU, I never knew there was a whole building that does missions for NASA, right?

There's missions that are commanded in ASU for NASA.

If young kids knew that, that across the street, if you live here in Arizona and you go to ASU, you have the chance, the opportunity to work with equipment that it's in Mars or in the moon, right?

- It's fascinating and a lot of people don't realize that.

- I never knew until I came and I saw a giant Mars rover in one of the buildings.

- Wow, that's incredible.

So this organization that you started or this community you created it's called the Mexican Graduate Association for International Students at ASU?

- [David] That is correct.

- And it's more social than academic at this point, right?

- Yes, so I think the first thing we wanted to do is starting to make connections in between students because it was during the middle of COVID, right?

So all of us were at home, we felt disconnected.

We couldn't travel back home, most people don't have family here or close by at all.

So it was just a small way for us to find each other and help each other out.

And now Miguel, who's the current president of the society, he's making awesome events.

So last year they bought 3,000 Pan de Muertos, and they put a bunch of altars in one of the buildings.

And people came, watched the altars, understood the history of and the importance of the Day of the Dead in Mexico.

And then they got their Pan de Muerto and hot chocolate.

- Mm, that's fabulous.

Yeah, it really makes a difference.

And mentorship, as you have explained makes a big difference as well.

You are involved in a volunteer mentoring program that people can get involved in now.

Tell me a little bit about that because that's also making a big difference.

- Yes, so I'm currently in two programs.

So the first one is with my undergrad university back in Mexico.

And what I do is that I get paired with senior undergrads in their last year and they're usually paired by interest.

So I typically get students that are interested in going into grad school internationally and people that want to go into research.

So we just meet across a semester virtually.

And I give them some tips and some insight on what the researcher life looks like, what an international grad student life looks like.

And so far I've mentored five people and I can say the one I keep a good connection with, she's now doing her master's in Germany.

- [Anaya] Wow, that's incredible.

- And on my second program, I tried to do those grassroots efforts I was telling you about.

So it's a program called Letters for a Pre-Scientist.

And throughout a whole year, you send snail mail letters to a kid in a K-12 program.

And you just talk to them about STEM, what do you do, how did you get there.

And you try to fish out what their interests are and how STEM actually plays a role in them.

So for instance, last year I had a student, he loved playing basketball.

That was all he talked about in his letters, but he got injured on his ankle, right?

So what I did is I started sending him diagrams of how the bones connect, how the muscles connect, how the ligaments and the tendons work, and why his injury was taking so long to heal.

And that kind of helped him ease his concerns of, he's a kid, like, "Am I gonna play basketball ever again?"

- Right, I'm sure he appreciated that though.

Well, as you were mentioning before we started talking in this conversation, you said that that particular organization is still looking for mentors.

- Yes, so Letters For a Pre-Scientist does a call every year during the spring semester looking for mentors.

I think this year they got an overwhelming amount of students joining the program and as far as I know, they were still looking out for mentors for this year.

But if you miss it, every year they do the call and it's as simple as filling out a questionnaire online.

You'll get a little training on how to handle kids.

And it's essentially if they start asking too personal questions, you kind of don't want to get into that.

You want to kind of guide them into STEM.

- Well, we know you're a perfect example that it can be life changing for people, so thank you.

I wanna remind people that it's called "Letters to a Pre Scientist" and it's at www.prescientist.org.

David, thank you so much for joining me.

- Thank you.

- And continue to make a big difference.

Lots of success to you.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

That's our show for tonight for "Horizonte" and Arizona PBS, I'm Catherine Anaya.

Thanks for joining us.

Have a great night.

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